Adam Baran

Yesterday I took in an advance screening of the new film “Perfect Stranger,” starring Halle Berry, Bruce Willis, and Giovanni Ribisi.  As I sat in the theater I took a notepad and started scribbling notes, just so I could keep an emotional diary of how I was feeling. 

Background :  In my opinion, Halle Berry is one of the absolute worst actresses on not just the Earth, but the entire Universe.  I should say though, that ever since I saw Halle in the film Monster’s Ball, I’ve been utterly smitten with her rottenness.  One of my favorite scenes to do an impersonation of is the scene between Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thorton right before they first make love.  This dialogue features Halle’s character talking about her newly deceased son.  She talks about him being so fat, and how he loved to go up to the Super K-Mart and put the quarters in the machine, because he had to get the red gumball.  This begins a 3 minute sequence of Halle saying the words, “had to get the red, had to get the red gumball, had to put the quarter in the machine, had to get the red, had to get the red,” over and over.  It’s utter genius as is my impression.  Please, call me, I’ll be glad to do it. 

So back to me scribbling notes.  First I write, “Anticipation..is making me wait.”  It’s not just a Carly Simon quote, it was how I really felt.  Then I wrote, “When will Halle appear?”  Then I wrote, “Halle should do some sort of merchandising tie-in with Boo Berry cereal.”  Boo Berry cereal of course, is the sort of red-headed stepchild in the Holy Trinity of scary cartoon cereals, the others being of course Count Chocula and FrankenBerry.  Then I wrote, “the music is creepy.”  Then I wrote, “Ahhh, the titles!  It was an eye.”  I wrote this because the title sequence is over these veiny abstract images that are then revealed to be an extreme close up of veins in an eye.  This is a foreshadowing of the plot, in which Halle Berry investigates the murder of her friend Grace O’Shea, who is brutally murdered by someone who puts Belladonna (a poison which I think was only ever seriously used on the Addams Family show) in her eyes. 

The film begins with Halle Berry checking her bag through a metal detector at some sort of congressional hall.  Halle looks nervous.  In fact, that’s what I wrote, “Halle is nervous.  Don’t be nervous girl.  You won an Oscar!  You can do this!”  Halle arrives at the office of Congressman Sachs (and yes, what his name sounds like is a total foreshadowing).  Halle, who’s name in the film is Rowena Price (!!!) tells him that she’s writing captions for an article, and she wants to show him some pictures so he can tell her what they’re of.  Now why any Congressman would agree to meet with someone to go over captions for an article is beyond me.  Isn’t this the type of thing that I don’t know - any intern can do?  Anyway, if I nitpick all those kind of things we’ll be here all night.  So Halle starts showing Sachs all these pictures and he fills in the captions.  Then she reveals a picture of Sachs with one of his interns.  Mmmmhmmm.  You know where this is going.  She confronts him for being basically a knock-off Mark Foley who fucks his male interns(even the writers of Law and Order would have been less literal in this ripped from the headlines business) and the energy with which she confronts him for being a gay-bashing hypocrite who fucks young boys makes me write down, “WERK!  Halle loves the gays!” 

Cut to the newspaper office where Halle is delivering her story to the editor of what’s essentially the New York Post.  Next scene, Halle and Giovanni Ribisi playing Miles, the tech guy, who bugs her laptop so they can get the goods on Sachs, celebrate in a bar.  Uh-oh.  Here comes the editor.  Halle’s story has been pulled.  Sachs used his influence to squash the piece.  Halle lets loose a hailstorm of expletives and quits the paper. 

Later, Halle’s on the subway.  Girl you know she woulda took a cab.  Oscar winners don’t take the subway!!!  Uh oh, here comes some blond girl.  That’s Grace O’Shea, Halle’s friend who tells her this long drawn out story about Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis) who Grace was apparently screwing and stalking because he wouldn’t return her phone calls.  Halle looks like she’s barely paying attention to this story, but that’s just her guile, as we’ll find out later. 

Next scene, Halle turns up at the morgue a week later and pukes Kool-Aid when she sees the body of Grace lying on a slab.  Grossness!  At this point I write down, “Why is Halle’s hair so terrible in this movie?  Who did her hair?  According to IMDB it was this man http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0379762/ who apparently did the hair for lots of movies I liked like Flirting with Disaster.  What went wrong this time? 

At this point I’m so wrapped up in the movie that I sort of lose myself in it.  It’s so fascinatingly bad, I can’t stop pondering how something as second-rate as this made it into theaters.  Remember when Halle Berry did Catwoman the year after Monster’s Ball?  And remember how she won a Razzie for Worst Actress?  And how she tried to be funny by going to the awards to accept?  And how she gave her acceptance speech by saying something to the effect of “To my agent, next time - Read the Script!!!”  Well I mean did she keep that agent?  Clearly it’s not the agent’s fault?  Clearly she either has no taste in scripts,  is so bad that nobody knows what to do with her, or she just picks whatever projects are going to pay her the most money.  If it was just for the money, I’d say mad props to her.  Do it, fine, whatever.  Be a hustler like Marky Mark.  But I think it’s a combo of four things:  she sucks hard, all she’s got going for her is her body, she doesn’t really have a good eye for projects, and she wants to make her money.  Is it any secret that her most honest and truthful performance was in B.A.P.S???  I think not. 

So okay to get to the point, Halle starts investigating Bruce Willis because she thinks he murdered her friend Grace.  Or is she?  Halle signs up as a temp, renames herself Catherine Pogue, the name clearly an homage to her favorite Irish punk band, The Pogues.  Halle entices Bruce Willis to a predictable degree, he starts wining and dining her and we find out that Bruce’s wife Mia is a nutter who makes art using Belladonna and eyeballs (RED FLAG, HELLO???) and follows him around spying on him because she’s so insanely jealous. 

Meanwhile back at Halle’s house, she goes out on a date with her ex-boyfriend and when she brings him back for some lovin, who’s standing in her kitchen in the dark listening to her lovemaking?  Giovanni Ribisi - oh no he’s crazy too!  Maybe he was the murderer!  Giovanni Ribisi later sets Halle Berry up with a Chat Room identity so she can start IM-ing with Bruce Willis whose IM name is ADEX (”It makes sense!  He’s one of the biggest ‘ad-exec-utives” in New York!”)  The way Halle (and the audience) is supposed to be getting excited about the thrill of talking dirty in an internet chat room makes me think this movie is actually a period piece set in 1994. 

Halle is almost caught a few times by Bruce Willis, who I must say - and this is a sign of how bad the film is - is the best one in the movie.   Anyway he starts wining and dining her like I said, and there’s a big fight when he discovers her trying to break into his computer.  She lies and says she was leaving him a list of all the places in New York where you could get daquiri’s.  Don’t ask.  For no other reason than that the movie would be over if he didn’t, which no normal person would, Bruce Willis buys it.  Gay!  (in the second grader use of the word)

So alright, then Halle goes over to Giovanni Ribisi’s house.  By this point we as an audience know he’s crazy for Halle, and we know that the person Halle’s been chatting with this whole time was not Bruce Willis, but Giovanni Ribisi.  So of course it’s time for the obligatory reveal, where Halle finds Ribisi’s secret porno room with a built in shrine to Halle.  It seems to me that the first clue that someone is going to be a serial killer is if they start cutting out pictures from a magazine and placing them collage style around their room.  I think schools should stop doing those collage projects where you have to cut out pictures and paste them onto construction paper for show and tell.  The art of collage is the pastime of serial killers!  So Halle sees the shrine and finds pictures of Ribisi and Grace (the murdered girl) fucking kinky style with belts and chains.  Ribisi comes in and we’re scared for a second, because Ribisi is doing a convincing DeNiro impression.  But since he lets Halle go, he’s obviously not the killer.  It makes no sense after this sequence why Halle doesn’t go to the police and turn Ribisi in - it would seem that he’s the most likely candidate.  But she presses on and convinces cops that it’s Bruce Willis who killed her friend. 

Montage sequence begins showing the trial of Bruce Willis, who gets convicted of murdering Grace O’Shea, even though there’s clearly no evidence other than circumstantial evidence that Willis had access to the Belladonna that his wife uses in her artwork to create those dilated eye paintings.   

Case closed, Bruce Willis goes to jail.  The end.  If only.  In the next scene we find Halle Berry in her kitchen waiting for some sort of closure.  Here comes nutbag Giovanni Ribisi - did I mention how miscast he is for this role?  He’s here to wrap up the story - and boy, it’s a doozy! 

So get this - the person who murdered Grace O’Shea was not really Bruce Willis, obviously.  No the person who committed the murder was…HALLE BERRY!!! That’s right, Halle Berry spent the whole movie investigating Bruce Willis for a crime that she committed!!  She went to all the trouble to try and get the goods on him so that she could actually plant the dirt on him that would send him to jail.  Meanwhile, she never would have been found out in the first place!!  Oh why did Halle kill Grace?  Easy, as we flash back to Halle Berry’s mom killing her abusive husband as he attempted to molest Halle Berry’s younger self.  Yeah, it’s basically the plot of Dolores Claiborne, but whatever.  They bury (Berry?  Halle Bury? See the subtle ways this movie works?) the husband in the backyard and Grace sees.  She then blackmails Halle Berry her whole life and when Berry sees her opportunity to get rid of Grace and blame it on someone else she takes it.  She researches Bruce Willis and finds out about his wife and her Belladonna art, uses that, kills Grace in that way, and then spends an inordinate amount of time setting Bruce Willis up. 

Does it sounds like it makes no sense?  You’re right!  It’s completely and utterly ridiculous.  Apparently according to IMDB, the filmmakers filmed 3 separate endings, and I don’t know, threw a dart at random to pick this one? 

Finally, after Ribisi has revealed this retardedness, he turns the tables on Halle Berry, saying that he’s not going to reveal her crime as long as she like, becomes his love slave or something.  He gets up close to her and she stabs him with a kitchen knife.  Then she messes up her apartment, puts a jar of Belladonna in his pocket, and calls the police and tells them they’ve got the wrong guy.  Oh no she didn’t!   But it’s going to be curtains for Halle, as the camera pans across the windows where, uh oh - some random stranger - the PERFECT STRANGER the title suggests, has seen her murder, and will undoubtedly tell police.   The final shot has the man across the street staring into Halle’s window.  Sorta like this :

But not smiling.  So basically this entire movie was a giant waste of any reasonable audience’s time.  My brain hurt trying to think of all the people who read this script and said, “Sure, why not?”  And Halle Berry, I salute you.  This movie is the apotheosis of your talent.  Brava!